Count By Songs Are Changing How Students Learn to Multiply

Learning Different Strategies

Every year, I teach my students a number of different strategies for how to solve multiplication problems and they come up with and show me a few more.

These include:

Drawing a Picture
Repeated Addition
Making an Array
And Count Bys

By far the favorite strategy for my students year after year is their count bys. This is probably because they are the fastest strategy (other than memorizing the answers) to use and they include singing (who doesn’t love that?).

Here’s a picture of my kids dancing with the crab in one of Have Fun Teaching’s Count by 9s video.

Memorizing Facts

I can still remember being in my elementary school years and sitting at the breakfast table or getting ready for school as my mom quizzed me on my multiplication facts. Some of them, like the 9s and 5s, have great tricks to help you, but most of them were all learned through straight memorization.

Don’t get me wrong – I thought it was really fun. I’ve always enjoyed math and I took pride in challenging myself to do multiplication. However, for those who don’t enjoy memorization or whose parents don’t have time to practice with them every day, multiplication can be a huge challenge.

In singing or rapping their Count Bys, students are memorizing all of the multiples of a number. When they have their songs down, they are able to memorize their facts significantly easier and quicker.

I’ve also put links to the videos on an elink to share them easily with students.

Below are my favorite Count By videos. I’m missing the 2s and 5s because they learn those in 1st grade before they come to me. Enjoy!

By @SEGroshell

Count By 3s